Worshwep?
I tried to skip the music, if you can call it music. It was more like a torturous throb, pierced through by angry whines and burbles. I found a pew in back and sidled over to the spot furthest from the drums. The blood of the calves who had given their skins for those drum heads cried out from the ground for the posthumous beating they were receiving from the flailing drummer. The guitarist stomped on a box on the floor so it would distort the sound the church had paid $300,000 to reproduce in crystal clarity. The bass player hammered his thumb onto the strings to fill whatever might have been lacking in the wounds of the sonic spectrum.
Suddenly, it all stopped, except for an ominous woom woom woom emanating from what I presumed to be a synthesizer. Everyone on stage closed their eyes and affected a grimace, as if the respite from the cacophony pained them as much as it relieved me. They lifted their hands into the air, swaying, and the leader emitted an asthmatic rasp:
“I just wanna
Lord, I wanna
I just really wanna
(spoken rasp) sing it with me!
I just wanna
Lord, I wanna
I just really wanna
Praaaaaaaaaaise!”
The jumbo screen behind the band, after briefly flashing what looked like an announcement slide for a youth activity, decided that we had not been able to follow what had just been sung, and so displayed the words to this sacred hymn.
And so it continued, with each chorus growing in intensity and fury:
“I just wanna
Lord, I wanna
I just really wanna
Praaaaaaaaaaise!”
After the seventh or eighth repetition, just as the grinding screech was reaching a fever pitch, the leader waved his arms to the band and said, “Hang on, hang on, guys!” The music careened to a halt like a toddler tumbling down the stairs. The worship leader opened his eyes, which were now red as from weeping. He sniffed into the microphone.
“Guys, I’m just like really convicted now, right?” He paused. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about what our worship is supposed to be like?”
I’m not sure it was a question, but that’s how he talked.
“And last week somebody tweeted about how there shouldn’t be an ‘I’ in worship? Because it’s not about ‘I’, it’s about ‘we’.” This being his first declarative sentence, I pondered how the word ‘worshwep’ would sound. He interrupted. “I think we need to stop singing so much about our ‘I-ness’ and start celebrating our ‘We-ness’.” A group of middle schoolers giggled.
Our Leader carried on. “So I feel like now, I need us to go deeper in our worship. So it’s not so much about I? So it’s about we?” He was back to asking again. I, not having an answer for him, took my leave.